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| Kim Kardashian, whose tweet comparing the threats of lawnmowers and terrorists, led to RSS acclaim |
In
December 2017 the Royal Statistical Society (RSS) announced the winner of its
“International Statistic of the Year”. The statistic was simply "69"
which it said was "the annual number of Americans killed, on average, by
lawnmowers - compared to two Americans killed annually, on average, by
immigrant Jihadist terrorists". The full RSS citation says that the statistic tweeted by Kim Kardashian
‘highlights misunderstandings of risk’ and ‘illuminates the bigger
picture’. Unfortunately, we believe it does exactly opposite as we explain in this brief paper:
Fenton, N.E., & Neil, M. (2018). "Are lawnmowers a greater risk than terrorists?" Open Access Report DOI:10.13140/RG.2.2.34461.00486/1
As you can see from the tweet by Taleb, this use of statistics for risk assessment was not universally welcomed.
See update to this story
here.
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